.

May 31, 2011

When I'm combing Nico and Youtube for pro mahjong stuff (RIP mahjong-douga) I find some really weirdo videos. The best stuff was always from Shin Janki, a series of movies about the adventures of the legendary underground mahjong player Shouichi Sakurai. In addition to having been undefeated in the illegal circuit for 20 years, he also directs!

Sakurai was a bad, bad dude at the mahjong table. Obviously you don't consistently win at a gambling game for twenty years straight if you aren't cheating, and cheat Sakurai did. Just like everybody else at the table. They're all mobsters, after all!

Of course, just like Golgo 13, it isn't too exciting to know that our hero will never lose at any point. So Onearm's Rep Player, the movie we have in English, is about a rival of Sakurai's. He's trying to "completely achieve the aesthetic beauty of mahjong". Within the first three minutes of the movie he has his arm chopped off in the trunk of a car by another rival, a mad dog who can only use mahjong to destroy! Without giving a lot away that you couldn't guess, ol' Onearm trains himself a protege, attempting to clone his skills into him (there is a training montage in which Onearm criticizes his protege for not slapping down the tiles firmly and loudly enough) to defeate the man who took his arm, and for the final battle against Sakurai that he could never have himself.

This is the eleventh Shin Janki movie: from this fact, and from the low production values and cheesy acting (insert your joke about major Japanese studio films here), it's safe to presume that this was a direct-to-video thing or a TV movie series. After all, these aren't movies that need any special effects or fancy camera tricks; though I imagine that either doubles are used or the actors are performing all the sleight of hand themselves. The scenes at the table are cheater's duels where no matter how flagrant the trick, every move is considered to be "faster than the eye can see," even though everybody is cheating all the time.

It was kind of fun. Low-budget, total B-movie. Still kind of fun. I'd watch another.

May 30, 2011

So I decided to put Badass Manly Anime Review on a tumblr too. After Kinoko Naisu (don't worry, he's still around) I just thought this would be a good idea. Is it actually? I don't know, I suppose we'll find out! The third review is something I have had sitting around for going on two years now, back when Ristorante Paradiso first aired. The show really begged for the treatment. It was saved for a secret project that didn't go down, and I've just sat on the review until today. Anyway, enjoy!

May 26, 2011

I don't know why I hadn't done a post about this show sooner. I'm sorry. Everybody go back in time and watch Dororon! Enma-kun Meramera when it started running. You may or may not regret it.

This is another Go Nagai revival anime, one of which we see nearly every year at this point. I went nuts over Yasuhiro Imagawa's Shin Mazinger myself. Why is it always Go Nagai being animated? There are certainly other legends out there. Matsumoto only gets one of his works re-animated every five years, you know? Why is the Dynamic Pro mine so frequently returned to?

It keeps producing, I'd say. Dynamic Productions has a huge merchandising branch (check out this baller Mazinger Z ring). Nagai was a damn workhorse at his height: he still works today every once in a while. Even though Mazinger returns to the screen every other year or so-- and according to the director himself we'll probably never see Shin Mazinger return, sigh-- that and Devilman and Cutey Honey are hardly all the man did.

So today, for the first time since the 70s, it's Dororon! Enma-kun's turn. And how: the show is being handled by Brains Base (most recently on DRRR and Princess Jellyfish) and directed by Gaogaigar maestro and karaoke singer Yoshitomo Yonetani. The animation quality is much, much higher than something that I can only presume has limited appeal even among anime fans: see Awesome Engine's appraisal of repulsed anime fan reactions to the show, for example.

It "looks old". It really does. It is old. This 2011 TV show hails from the 70s and it's proud. It takes place in that time period (in one of the more overt 70s gags that pepper the show, the characters pass through the Vietnam War). The theme song (by Masaaki Endoh, famous himself for singing the Gaogaigar theme and the greatest anime cover ever recorded) sounds totally 70s rock. There is a nostalgia in this show that is a little different from what we usually see in these remakes: it is not so much a nostalgia for a character as it is a time and a place. It is worth noting that judging by his date of birth, Mr. Yonetani was probably in elementary school in the 70s, just like the kids in this show.

Our heroine-- sort of-- is Harumi (ANN has her name listed as Harumi Fudo: is she a relative of Devilman Akira Fudo? Will this come up in the show? I hope so!), a hapless young girl who falls in with the Demon Patrol, who-- sort of-- protect Japan from the many demons who plague the populace in really weird ways for the hell of it.

It's not exactly a serious show, and it strongly recalls Nagai's equally nonsensical gag manga. Most episodes will concentrate on a single gag (like "there's a demon that makes everybody prat fall-- all the time") and just wail on it for twenty minutes until there's nothing left, often past that point. Meramera has no particular regard for the fourth wall, and a lot of episodes get distracted to the point where you might get frustrated if, you know, you actually care what happens. (C'mon!) Pacing can be a problem in this show: I'm reminded of the slightly more tasteless Panty and Stocking, which kept its episodes to 15 minutes and its jokes fresher.

One of the major additions to Meramera is the sheer amount of sex. Now don't get me wrong, Nagai made his name by being seriously raunchy in kids' manga, but this remake takes it as far out there as it can get away with on late-night television. The sidekick, Princess Yukiko, gets molested about every ten minutes, and the show lingers like a dirty old man in a locker room. It's to the point where when a character stops to ask "Wait, is this porno?" you start to wonder the same thing yourself.

Funny thing, though: even this isn't too far removed from Nagai. As the show goes along Enpi-chan, a character from a porn parody that Go Nagai himself drew, appears, wearing... a cape. She sticks around, with the stated goal of "creating a fun and sexy world". So it's a pretty dirty show, but Go Nagai's a pretty dirty dude. As usual with Go Nagai, be prepared.

As regular readers of this blog are probably already aware, I have a high level of tolerance for bad taste, so this is my gotta-watch show for this season (after Kaiji) every week. As for yourselves, why not just watch the first episode? I promise you'll know right away whether or not to keep watching.

May 16, 2011

So I read a great blog post today about the elitism of competitive gaming communities, and I agree wholeheartedly. You can see it in action: people are often shitty to new players in any game where players compete, and it doesn't help anybody. Keep in mind I'm not even talking about the strongest players here: I'm talking about the medium-level, advanced and even the people just past beginner level who rub newbies' noses into their limited prowess.

Especially for the fighting games, which lack strong tutorials, step two or three of properly learning the game is going online and checking out the communities. I find Shoryuken's forums unreadable, myself, so these days I watch Youtube tutorials and match videos and pay close attention. In any case, the new players lean on the old, and the smartest of the old players understand that they need the new players just as badly. Guys like that (like Alex Valle, to name one) work to improve the scene. Without players, everybody is done.

The comments in the article prove the guy right: the first major objection comes from a dude who states his Starcraft rank before his objections. He tries to reframe the situation by saying that there are more know-nothing loudmouths than there are sincere newbies. It's true, there are a lot of these guys in nerd-land and they are particularly bad when it comes to competitive games. If you look at the non-enthusiast boards for fighting games, you'll see the most ridiculous statements made by low-level players from imagined positions of authority.

I've been playing Blazblue CS2 a lot, and I just fought a guy who quit in the middle of the match. I checked the guy's XBL profile, as I often do with ragequitters: I find they have weird stuff in there. Sure enough, the profile is a screed on Blazblue in which the player says he doesn't respect people who start their combos with jabs. (Unless you are playing Tsubaki, as I was, because "she sucks". He ragequit anyway.) I imagine he also doesn't respect throwing anything but strikes in baseball. Stuff like this is just foolish arrogance from a weak player with no desire to improve. I have no mercy for the "throwing is cheap" crowd, but I also don't think every situation is so black and white as that one.

Let me take an example from the tiny, tiny English-language Japanese mahjong scene. Every once in a while I try and read the forums at reachmahjong.com. Unfortunately, the community (only really two forums, one of which is much smaller) is bit of a ghost town. Whenever I stop by, I remember why.

Without fail, the only threads that get any activity, for months at a time, have been these threads where a hapless newbie walks in and all the seasoned players jump in to scream how wrong he is at him. After that, they ultimately go at each other's throats over some piece of minutiae like "you're not supposed to use the phrase deal in!". Here's the most recent one, in which a newbie posts an "Advanced Guide" and is promptly eviscerated in progressively more condescending posts from more advanced players, the last of whom (a high ranker on Tenhou) completes the circle by attacking the other regular posters.

The original poster's advice is certainly not the best (I looked up an early version of the post), but unreservedly attacking this totally hapless fellow, who only wanted to share what he had learned with people, is in really poor form. The guy is so humiliated that he takes down his post altogether and will likely never be seen on those boards again. Of course, to the experienced player and the mod, it was a lot more important to express their supremacy than to leave this guy's dignity intact.

Competition entails certain hard truths. You want to win consistently, so you want to do what works. In MJ you want to build a strong hand that's ideally also likely to come out. In Marvel, you want to build a strong team whose abilities complement each other (says Dave, the gimmick team player who most recently tried a Morrigan/Iron Man/Thor projectile team), rather than just picking three guys who look cool. There is a lot of hard work behind those goals. There is no way around that work. It just has to get done. No magic allowed. This is the first lesson, and strong players often find themselves tasked with teaching the weaker how deep the pool they are wading in really is. This is how it should be. But when you tell someone the truth like an asshole, guess what? There is no way they're going to listen.

Being good still doesn't make it a good idea to be a shit to those who aren't on your level. You can get away with it, yes, but it's unproductive. These competitive scenes-- especially the small ones-- require numbers, and representing the public face of your game as a petulant douchebag will make those numbers go down. Even if it isn't an organized activity, even if there isn't some authority to promote and enforce good sportsmanship, we need to practice it ourselves, on and off the game.

On that note, I will continue to push my friends in the USPML to finally run a tournament. Don't worry, they'll get around to it!

May 14, 2011

This is old news at this point, but after years of serving the "wwwww" crowd in Japan, the famous chaos machine Nico Nico Video now has an English-language site. What is so different about Nico compared to all the other video sites? Comments. Nico simply overlays audience comments onto existing Youtube videos (in Japan Nico started this way but now hosts its own video) as an ongoing, scrolling commentary in real time. This is clearly either a great idea or a terrible one.

It is well-known, for example, that Youtube commenters are a good estimate of exactly how dumb the average citizen really is. Now imagine their particular brand of awful shit scrolling back and forth across your screen. It's pretty scary.

There is something else going on, though, that doesn't happen at all with Youtube comments. You don't wait until you're done watching the video to say something. You don't even have to look away. You speak right then and there as you're watching the thing, and the comment stays there on that point in the video. Like 2ch before it, it's anonymous, so go nuts. In a weird way, this is an indirect, communal experience. Being funny on Nico is something of an art in and of itself: check out the ASCII art towards the end of this Spider-Man video.

At its best, Nicovideo is complete screaming madness. What the hell are you even watching right now? What the hell are these people talking about? Go with it. wwwwwwwwww. The closest to "American Nico" I've seen thus far is the video for Rebecca Black's Friday, a meme which by this point has been absolutely pummeled into the ground. The level of chaos is there, but, well... I don't think anybody says anything funny the entire video.

What Nico English lacks at this point is a community outside of the Wapanese population of the internet (they've already live-streamed at Sakuracon!). View numbers are crazy low: a "hit" video on here is one that reaches the thousands of views and the site hasn't had any one video really blow up yet. When you realize that Friday-- which took America by storm and has close to 140 million views on Youtube as I write this-- only has 2,000 views, you get an idea of how infetisimally small Nico is right now. Premium services have yet to be opened (I want to buy Premium so I can watch more mahjong tournaments, I admit it) because when there's this little content, who's gonna pay?

So my advice is to get on Nico. Add videos. Talk shit. Be funny. It'll be a good time.

May 07, 2011

I spent the 50 dollars from winning Marvel on the Limited Edition of Deathsmiles, as the games dealer was mostly a retro dealer and didn't have any of the recent titles that were on my wishlist (I'm really curious about WWE All-Stars).

Most Dangerous Anime was a little different this year, in large part because this was likely the final panel and I wanted to empty the guns, so to speak. I emphasized short stuff, as in things we could watch in their entirety right then and there. It's a long panel (two hours!) so I run large swaths of material. Specifically, this year I experimented with playing little shorts between the footage. Ko had just been sharing entries from Niconico's Miku Miku Dance Cup, and so I bookended the anime with stuff like Volare and Love Angel Lucifer.

Attendance was respectable, as by now the panel has been building up a little following. The biggest laughs came from either Love Angel Lucifer, the Prince of Tennis fandub, or Charge Man Ken.

Putting aside the shorter clips, the titles for the general audience panel were:

Zaizen Jotaro

Abunai Sisters

Prince of Tennis (fandub)

Charge Man Ken

Azteckaiser

A lot of other stuff puffed out the panel as I went along, like SPACE LANCE and that Loudness hit Odin. One of the things I've learned from this panel is that even if I plan for two hours, I'll move too fast once the thing gets going, so I like to keep a surplus.

After MDA I was up with Mike on Dubs that Time Forgot (I was technically the “staff member” in the room, but I was also playing sidekick). This was the biggest AV failure of the weekend, as our equipment simply never arrived. At fifteen minutes late we were worried and I thought to whip out my own big-screen laptop. It took ten more minutes to actually get the files from one source to the other, so Mike had half an hour to run his panel, as the remaining audience (you guys really stuck it out, thanks!) crowded around the screen.

We were technically scheduled for a cosplay counter-programming panel, but nobody showed and we wound up just sitting in a room talking for two hours. No, seriously.

The 18+ panel, just like last time, was a standing-room-only hit before we even got going (and we got going late). Unlike the regular panel, anything you put 18+ on absolutely sells itself. Well, actually, it became a 17+ panel on the way into the schedule (I didn't find this out until a bunch of upset 17-year-olds plowed in and pointed it out). This shouldn't surprise, but it's worth noting: the crowd for this panel was not only significantly larger but significantly younger than that for the regular panel.

I consider this panel tricky to put together, which is funny because ultimately I made really easy choices for it. There's a whole slide at the beginning of the panel that tries to explain it with the image of an angry, topless hooker. I wanted to let the audience know straight out that it wasn't a porn panel: after all, those are overdone. It was merely kind of gross and tasteless.

And to back that up I ran Apocalypse Zero and Mad Bull 34. The crowd just wasn't ready for Apocalypse Zero: there were several people in the audience loudly begging me to stop after the first monster. No dice, guys. You were warned. People are always skeptical about the name of this panel, you know? They want me to prove it before the show even starts. A lot of people come up and ask me what they're going to see before the panel, and I absolutely refuse to tell them. They always think they've seen something more dangerous already. When I warn at the start of a panel, I really mean it!

Daryl from AWO (who I'm certain would enthusiastically approve of my programming choices) had asked me exactly how much of these shows I run at these panels to fill up two hours, and my answer was “a lot.” There was probably a half-hour of Apocalypse Zero and an hour's worth of Mad Bull as I ran through every single highlight. More than the other panel, this one is a case of stretching the material. That said, people really enjoyed it, especially Mad Bull. At the very end I ran the Dragon Ball Soulja Boy video followed by Klay-On and people just about died.

As usual at I-Con, Sunday was pretty much a dead day. I arrived late (we got caught with one thing after another, most amusingly a pack of enraged daddy's-money bros throwing a fit and being kicked out of the hotel after trashing their room) for the Super Robotology panel, which Mike was running for an audience of about five. Mike and I had been talking about this panel for a while, but the con snuck up on us and we only really had what video we could grab beforehand (which is quite a lot, these days). My contribution to the panel was a big ol' pile of 70s and 80s toy commercials. Around the time we got going on those, some parents brought an actual small child in, who loved and said “I WANT THAT!” to every ad. I'm really glad we were able to make that little moment for someone.

We had pizza on the way home and I was seriously astonished at how good the sausage roll at Manhattan Pizza, a little mini-mall joint not far from Stony Book, really was. I did not expect that at all, and I couldn't have been happier after putting down cafeteria food all weekend.

So I did what is likely my last I-Con this year. This is simply as a result of a good staffer friend resigning. I had a lot of fun doing I-Con, but if it wasn't for my buddies I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be making the trip year after year.

I'd like to thank the Most Dangerous Anime audience for coming by and having fun. Your reactions validated all the work (okay, not a lot of work) I did on these panels. I'd also like to thank Joe and Sarah for their hard work on the con, their continuing support, and for talking me into doing this stuff in the first place a couple of years ago. I'll still be paneling, of course.

I got into the con Thursday night for dinner and drinks, and I was pretty well-rested for Friday. After all, the con doesn't start until 6 PM. I was only there Thursday because hey, why not?

Friday afternoon I met up with my fellow ANN columnist Mike Toole, and while he prepared panels we talked a bit about the day's panels and the con itself. The booklet has a couple of weird things about it: while there are no descriptions of panels or events at all, for example, there are four pages of letters to the reader by staff, all of which can be essentially boiled down to “I've been staffing I-Con for 15 years and it's perfect”. I-Con has always felt a little narcissistic: I can't think of another geek con that has as many hours of programming about itself. Also, the con's bootleg policy-- which would be proven in force at the dealer's room-- is “We have a strong stance against bootlegs, but there will be bootlegs in the dealer's room and if you buy them you're screwed.”

The day's first panel was “Anime '81”, for which Mike had simply assembled videos of every single anime that ran on Japanese TV 30 years ago. Imagine trying to show clips of every anime that ran this year in an hour, and you'll understand how much slower anime production was back then. I don't remember the numbers, but we're talking about maybe 30 works. Quite an interesting panel. Shame about the AV setup, though: AV arrived twenty minutes late, we only had laptop speakers for audio, and the projector screen was misaligned. AV problems and big delays would continue throughout the panels, and this wasn't even the worst of them.

We hit the dealer's room straight after to catch up with Ed Chavez and James at the Vertical booth. It's always a pleasure. Honestly, at the last couple of cons I've been to I've found myself in the habit of killing dead time by chatting with Vertical. The rest of the dealer's room was the same as the I-Con room I've been seeing for years now: it looks very close to a typical anime con dealer's room, save a booth or two. Bootleg items were rampant, with some of the largest tables (a DVD seller and a vendor of anime trinkets) stocking almost exclusively counterfeit wares. I recalled the same damn tables from previous years, and recalled the bootleg policy. A strong stance against bootlegs doesn't mean you're no longer willing to make money off them.

(Protip: If a shop happens to still carry older Nendoroids from series that American anime fans like, like Black Butler, Death Note, or Gurren Lagann, it is almost certainly a bootlegger.)

I spent a couple hours at the Marvel 3 tourney. You guys know I love that stuff, and I have worked out some nasty tricks for my Spidey/X-23/Haggar team. Spider-Man's a great and underrated character in this game: what he lacks in control of the screen, he makes up for in mobility and versatility. Getaroundability. It's not an exaggeration to say that the Ultimate Web Throw reset trick won me the $50 gift card that was up for grabs. The team is built around him: Haggar's invincible lariat is a godsend for any close-range fighter, and Spidey needs an OTG (hits on the ground) assist for big damage. Spidey's Web Ball makes it easy for X-23 and Haggar to get in when they're on point. As an extra bonus, all the characters' Hyper Combos chain neatly into each other, making switching easy. I may swap X-23 out for someone else (like Viper, if I feel like putting that amount of time in), but even as is the team is quite strong. But enough about that! The important part is that I won. The crowd was like “YOOOO”, and I took my victory as an opportunity to plug my panels.

At 11 there was this panel called Con Horror Stories: I found out that this panel consisted of me just a few days before the con, so beforehand I had asked Mike to sit on the panel with me. I opened with my favorite con story, the one that starts with the girl I was going to room with calling me weeping on the morning of the con to cancel her and all her friends' reservations, and which ends with me and my buddy kicking our other roommate out for trying to bone a 15-year-old girl in our room and then us leaving on a Greyhound at three in the morning. Believe it or not, I kind of bombed this story. Nobody was really impressed. I was still jittery, I guess.

What I realized in retrospect about my con stories is that rather than being horrific, they're just kind of awkward and depressing. Like the phone conversation between myself and the aforementioned roomie, a stranger before this weekend, trying to convince me to leave the room for a little while and let him screw a 15-year-old. The time a Morrigan cosplayer (to be polite, unflattered by her costume choice) approached me with a “looking for cute boys” sign and stared silently at me. I decided to think of other material, like the second-hand “I know a guy who knows a guy who almost cut someone's arm off with a sword at a con” story.

Anyway, Mike really saved my ass up there with old con stories and funny video clips. Eventually we worked out a rapport with the crowd, and by the end it was going really well. We still ended early (you just can't fill two hours with this) at the peak of the panel, a famous clip from the amazing Megaforce.

And then we were done. The only thing left was drive-through McDonald's in the middle of the night, and sleep. Saturday was when it got exciting.